This is a review, a journey of enlightenment (that sounds so Zen), learning, and eye opening experience for a techie who has not used a smart phone at all. I am still in love with the Samsung SIII, and that is essentially my next smartphone …. but in the mean time I will love what I got, the HTC Desire HD. I still have my Nokia C200 which well works for 3 days, without need for a recharge, has primitive Facebook and Twitter so hey I got lots to compare with 🙂 Did I mention that the HTC and Nokia phones use the same data cable, well now that is a welcome feature since I can cut down on the cabling on my desk and travel bag.

The first thing I do for any computer that I get is upgrade it, thankfully the phone has inbuilt WIFI so all I did was turn on WIFI, and use the office wireless connection, now that is really neat. When I checked the HTSense 3.0 was upto date and the Android version 2.3.5 was the latest. There was no way to go any higher due to the 512MB ROM which was too small, again acceptance. Next step was to install Tweetdeck, yes, no Facebook since I am on a 30 day no Facebook diet, and I seem to be handling it very well btw.

Email next, both my work and personal email are Google, so I just fired up the pre-installed Gmail APP and we are off to the races. Syncing took a long time and later I found out why, my personal Gmail box is “big” with all sorts of emails, Linked In, Twitter, Newsletters, GitHub, MojoLive, GeekList, etc, so I configured my personal Gmail to only show emails from the priority inbox which makes it manageable.

Next test camera, but oh no, it does not work. Seems like the delivery man (who brought me the phone) decided to take the only thing that would not be missed, the microSD card, really!!! Now I gave up on that one till I bought a 2GB card, then wow!!! The camera is really good! Crisp clear photos

Still on the battery problem, seemed like I had turned on background sync for Twitter and Gmail so now I turned them off, installed Juice Defender following steps at  http://www.stephenjackel.com/2011/04/16/how-to-fix-battery-life-problem-on-htc-desire-hd-android-2-2-mobile-phone/ I still got my eye on the battery life.

Oh yes next battle, sharing my contacts with my Nokia, it has been my primary phone for over a year now (lovely feel and battery life), so I have a couple hundred contacts, which I have rebuilt after losing them a few weeks ago when the battery went dead and deleted everything. Using Google I found instructions at http://leetstreet.net/blog/2011/05/nokia/ which let me export all my contacts from Nokia into Google Contacts, and just sync them into the HTC. So all I need to do is add new numbers to the Nokia and HTC, and I am done, how so handy it has become that I add business cards as I get them from meeting to meeting ….

It seems like I am a fanboy, but I love the contact linking between Skype, Whatsapp, Google and my contact list, and I assume that once I get another Android gadget they will all be transferred to it, which is nyce given that all is then stored in the cloud.

Customizing the screen pages, well I love my right menu on my Nokia which gives me quick and easy access to the same menu items I have used for the last 10 years, Inbox, General Profile, Silent Profile, Task List, Calculator and I am done. I have mulitple tabs on Android so on my main screen (like my old feature phone) I have got Gmail, Twitter, Messages, Call historry, Contact list, opera mini and the default browser, Whatsapp (I find myself using it more and more). Now on the second screen I have got other common utilities, Camera (great quality), Gallery, Reader found books on here though I have failed to connect to Kobo for more books, iStoryBooks (a gold mine, my kids are loving my phone and wait eagerly to get at each book that I have downloaded), calculator, wordpress statistics for my blog, Google Talk, Flashlight, Google Playstore, Calendar, Evernote (trying to use it to share notes across everything), and Skype.

I also ran into a problem of syncing my calendar with my phone with the creation of duplicated events. This puzzled me till I remembered that I already have 2 way sync between my Google Calendar and MS Outlook, so syncing both with my phone creates two events. This one was cleared using instructions from http://sysadminspot.com/phones/delete-pc-sync-calendar-on-htc-desire/ So once that was done all I had to do was turn off the Outlook calendar event sync from HTC sense on my laptop and voila!! It was all good to go. So now I create an event in Outlook it ends up in Gmail and on my phone and vice versa, and I love it. So no more birthdays forgotten or events missed.

And oh yes I have been introduced to the pain of Internet bandwidth data caps, I found that I ran through 100MB in a week, yet I only use the mobile data when I am out office, I use the office WIFI when in office. I found that the cheapest bandwidth 30MB which is valid for 24 hours for 10 days is the same cost as 100MB which is valid for one month. So I will need to find a way to automate my daily purchases so that I do not have to go through the 6 steps to get around the USSD codes.

The major challenges, that I am still running into are battery life which dies after an hour or two of heavy use, when I go out for meetings so it’s tied to a USB port on my laptop, left the 240V power charger which uses USB too at home to make sure I have my bases covered. Also I found that using the power charger gets it full while the USB charger does not move it along as fast.

So HTC love your phone, but there is terrible battery life …